Actor Harrison Ford was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1942. From a young age he was a low-key and mostly shy person, but he took a drama class to overcome that shyness after enrolling in the private liberal arts school Ripon College in Wisconsin, and as a result he became fascinated with acting.

Ford moved to Los Angeles in 1964 and signed a contract as a new talent with Columbia Pictures, his first uncredited role being a bellhop in the crime film Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round (1966). When Ford finally did get screen credit in the 1967 Western A Time for Killing, his name read “Harrison J. Ford.” The “J” didn’t stand for anything but he had to add something to his name to distinguish himself from silent film actor Harrison Ford according to the Screen Actors Guild. Although Ford later dropped the “J” and left Columbia to play minor roles for Universal, including TV shows like Gunsmoke, Ironside, The Virginian, Kung Fu and Love, American Style.

Casting director and frequent Francis Ford Coppola collaborator Fred Roos was actually the one who secured an audition with George Lucas for Harrison Ford. Lucas saw potential in the small-time actor and he chose Ford to play Bob Falfa in American Graffiti (1973).

Even Francis Ford Coppola would use Ford for a few roles, including in the 1974 thriller The Conversation and in the 1979 war drama Apocalypse Now (in which Ford played an army colonel named “G. Lucas.”) But these small roles eventually led to a starring role in George Lucas’s 1977 space opera Star Wars as the cynical smuggler Han Solo. That film’s popularity catapulted Harrison Ford into the public eye and he would go on to reprise the role several more times, including in the equally lauded sequels The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983) and in J.J. Abrams’ The Force Awakens (2015).

Ford had another huge hit (this time in the lead role) when he was cast as archaeologist Indiana Jones in Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). A character who now rivals Han Solo in global popularity. Ford’s role in this film cemented his status as a leading man, and just like with Han Solo, he would go on to reprise the role several more times, including in Spielberg’s 1984 prequel Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the 1989 sequel Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the 2008 follow-up Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and James Mangold’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023).

A year after Raiders of the Lost Ark came out, Ford would play another classic character. This time replicant-hunting cop Rick Deckard in Ridley Scott’s cyberpunk drama Blade Runner (1982) based on Philip K. Dick’s dystopian sci-fi novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Ford would revisit the role once again when Denis Villeneuve directed the 2017 sequel Blade Runner 2049.

The neo-noir crime thriller Witness (1985) starring Ford as a police detective who witnesses a murder and becomes a target himself, was another critically acclaimed box office hit for Ford, and it would garner his first Academy Award nomination.

In the nineties Harrison Ford had a string of success beginning with the legal thriller Presumed Innocent (1990) starring Ford as a prosecutor charged with murder, he played Jack Ryan in the Hunt for Red October sequel Patriot Games (1992), he played a man on the run in the Academy Award-nominated The Fugitive (1993) which was based on the TV series of the same name and was a critical and commercial hit, he reprised the role of Jack Ryan in the similarly acclaimed Patriot Games sequel Clear and Present Danger (1994), and he played the president in the political action thriller Air Force One (1997) in which Ford contended with a group of terrorists.

Ford would occasionally shake things up with his roles, including in the late nineties when he got a little more light and romantic opposite Anne Heche in Ivan Reitman’s adventure comedy Six Days, Seven Nights (1998) which was a commercial success despite critics calling the screenplay predictable, but by the next decade his filmography got a lot more mixed in quality and he wouldn’t really have a hit film again until Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in 2008. Even his return to the sci-fi genre with Cowboys & Aliens (2011) and Ender’s Game (2013) wasn’t enough to interest critics and audiences. At least not until 2015 when he reprised the role of Han Solo in The Force Awakens. Although Blade Runner 2049 was largely ignored when that film came out two years later, despite the well-deserved critical acclaim it received. You could say Illumination’s The Secret Life of Pets 2 (2019) counts as a hit Harrison Ford film though, because that movie, in which Ford voices a Welsh sheepdog named Rooster, was a big hit with audiences, despite modest reviews (which makes it just like most of Illumination’s films).

Harrison Ford also recently joined the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross aka the Red Hulk in Captain America: Brave New World (2025). A role originally played by William Hurt in Marvel’s 2008 film The Incredible Hulk (a film which many are calling Brave New World a stealth sequel to). Knowing how the MCU works, it’s possible Ford may reprise this role in the future, but for now, at least according to most critics, his entry in the MCU is off to a rocky start.

Movies aren’t Harrison Ford’s only medium. He also has a lead role in Yellowstone prequel series and 1883 sequel series 1923, a Western drama which premiered on Paramount+ in 2022 and according to Paramount became that streaming services’s biggest debut ever. Ford also stars in the 2023 Apple TV+ comedy Shrinking as a senior therapist with Parkinson’s disease opposite Jason Segel and Jessica Williams. Both 1923 and Shrinking have received critical acclaim, so if Ford ever gets bored making movies he may have another avenue to go. Although it’s not like he phones it in when he’s making big blockbuster action films. He’s not a flashy person in real life and he’s not usually the first name you hear come up when people talk about great cinematic performances, but usually when you watch him act it’s hard to see the line between Harrison Ford and the character he is playing, and I think that blurring of the lines and the low-key “real person” charm he usually brings to his roles is one of the reasons why he is so beloved as an actor and one of the reasons why he is one of the best actors out there.